Huggers, who published a blog today expanding on the review process, also admitted that in reality the BBC had far more website addresses that would need to be culled than just the 400 listed because of the "many [website link] redirects we set up to make it easy to promote sites in our broadcasts".

Nielsen calculated that the BBC has 586 top-level domain names, while Comscore reckoned that there are 494.

The move comes alongside plans to cut BBC Online's budget and staff by 25% by 2013. Huggers defended the cutting of web domains as more than a headline-grabbing stunt

"I know some have questioned the importance of this number... however tackling the symptom of a problem does provide a real incentive to change, and in meeting the tld [top level domain] challenge we are reviewing the entire site from top to bottom. As a result, we willl be making some tough decisions about what we want to commit to in future, and what not."

The director of BBC Future Media and Technology added:

"So for sites that we don't want to modernise or simply delete, there is a question about the best way to archive them for future generations and we are looking at the options now. If anyone has a solution to this, we'd be pleased to hear from them."